Now it was this spirit of a young nation which the foreign-born caught. In the older country where it was dead I haven’t much doubt but what Dardoni and his fellows were a shiftless lot. If they had remained they would probably have plugged along in a beggarly rut. It wasn’t until they came over here that they roused themselves to work, not ploddingly like uninspired natives, but with a romantic fervor that made these old acres yield as they had never yielded before. They brought with them no modern agricultural methods. They took the land as they found it, and it was their simple pioneer standards, their pioneer earnestness, their pioneer courage, that brought them success. They worked for independence with the same pioneer enthusiasm and industry which inspired the early settlers. How long would that little band of adventurers who landed on the rocky shore of Massachusetts have lasted if they had shown no more backbone than those who to-day fold their hands and shake their heads at the deserted farms surrounding them? * * * * * The more I talked over these things with Ruth the more excited I became. It was as clear as daylight that idle land could not forever exist in the face of a needy market. I had learned at school the phrase that “Nature abhors a vacuum.” Rural New England to-day was practically a vacuum and nature was already finding a way to fill it. She was forcing in adventurers of other nations with the challenge to the native born to either get to work or get out. If anyone wants to see proof of this for himself let him travel through the Connecticut valley, or along the Massachusetts cape, or through the small towns in the neighborhood of Boston. Let him go into the hill towns of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, and he will find there Italians, Portuguese, Russians, Poles, already established and accepted where twenty years ago a foreigner was a curiosity. They are the vanguard of the army Nature is marshaling for her certain purpose. Let the traveler look below the superficial squalor and learn how many people these pioneers are supporting, how much they are saving and how much they are buying, and he will catch an inkling of what’s afoot. I had seen this going on in the city, but there the contrast between what was and what is was not so marked. New England cities have long ceased to be merely New England, and I had come out into the country for that very reason. I had wanted a taste of undiluted New England, and this was what I found.